Margaret Kilgallen, 33

Artist painted murals around San Francisco

July 05, 2001|By New York Times News Service.

Margaret Kilgallen, an artist who contributed to the vibrant fusion of graffiti art, folk art, painting and installation art that emerged in San Francisco in the 1990s, died June 28 in San Francisco. She was 33.

The cause was complications of breast cancer, her family said.

Ms. Kilgallen was born in Washington and raised in Kensington, Md. She received a bachelor's degree in studio art and printmaking at Colorado College before moving to San Francisco. Exposed to bluegrass music as a child, Ms. Kilgallen was a skillful banjo player. In San Francisco she took up surfing, becoming equally adept.

In 1990 she met her future husband, Barry McGee, also a surfer, and one of several young painters showing in galleries and painting non-commissioned murals on city walls.

She and McGee, married in 1999, became part of a circle that included the artists Chris Johanson, Phil Frost, Ed Templeton and Thomas Campbell.

Ms. Kilgallen eventually painted hundreds of murals around San Francisco, most of which have been painted over.

Until 1997, she worked as a book conservator in the San Francisco Public Library, a job that enabled her to study traditional type fonts, which became central to her work.

Her installations featured words and cartoonish figures, usually women, painted in different scales on pieces of wood that resembled shop signs, or directly on walls on top of expanses of odd, Depression-conjuring colors.

Ms. Kilgallen's work is currently in "East Meets West," an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia through July 29, and at Stanford University, where she received a master's degree on June 17.